1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a transport device for automatically cutting and opening a package. A bundle of flattened packing container blanks, covered with packaging material on the outside, are provided for automatically supplying the blanks, after the blanks are opened, to a position relative to the cutting position of packaging material. The blanks are thereafter supplied to succeeding workstations. A series of transport devices are provided for transporting the blanks one at a time and raising the blanks into parallelepipeds with a square-shaped cross section.
2. Description of Background Art
Conventionally, various paper containers have been manufactured for a variety of uses. For example, singlelife packing containers are widely used for packaging liquid food product, such as milk and juice, and as shown in FIG. 24, some have a parallelepipedic form A'.
The blanks A for this type of packing container are invariably folded flat as shown in FIG. 23 for storage, transporting, and in order to facilitate other handling. As shown in FIG. 18, the blanks A are bundled and packaged on the outside with packaging material B.
As shown in FIG. 16, the blanks A' are raised into parallelepipedic form with a square-shaped cross section and are sent to a mandrel wheel E of the packing machine D for sealing the bottom before filling the container with liquid contents. However, in order to send the aforesaid blanks A' to a mandrel wheel E, the plurality of bare blanks A obtained by cutting and opening packaging material B of bundled package C must be supplied to a separate position removed from the cutting position and the blanks A must be transported forward while raising the blanks A into a parallelepipedic shape with a square-shaped cross section.
Hence, conventionally in most cases, the plurality of flattened blanks A are propped up on a platform before being delivered to a mandrel wheel E as shown, for example, in Japanese Pat. Pub. 62-201562.
Moreover, the cutting and opening work of packaging material B for package C involves either manual work or a device as disclosed in Japanese Pat. Pub. 62-271828. To supply a plurality of flattened blanks A to the aforesaid platform after cutting and opening also requires either manual work or a supplying device as disclosed in Japanese Pat. Pub. 62-201562.
Finally, after supplying to the platform, the flat blanks A must be raised into a parallelepipedic form with a square-shaped cross section in order to insert them in a mandrel wheel E. There is a known device that grasps a propped up blank A with a suction head and pulls it out, while at the same time forming a parallelepiped with a square-shaped cross section.